Kathy Griffin leaves loose end

Published 7:55 pm, Sunday, April 13, 2014

Schenectady

Kathy Griffin is like your motormouth best friend who's naturally funny and talks so much that a good deal of what she says is entertaining.

But she's not a disciplined comedian; the craft of stand-up comedy and the honing and shaping of a routine don't seem to interest her much. As she said repeatedly from the stage at Proctors on Saturday night, she tends to say whatever pops into her frantically churning brain, and if it happens to come in the middle of another story, well, you're all going on a detour. She may get back to the original anecdote, or not.

More Information

Comedy review

Kathy Griffin

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Proctors, 432 State St., Schenectady

Length: 110 intermission, no intermission

The crowd: About 1,700, or two-thirds full, adoring and vocal

Griffin isn't exactly scattered as a performer. Instead, she seems to have so much she wants to share with the audience that she'll promise several times to get around to telling you about some particularly juicy encounter but never deliver. Case in point: Minutes into her Proctors show, Griffin said she'd later regale us with "all the dirt" about what went on backstage at the Grammy Awards this year; she even asked the audience a little later to remind her to come back to it. But when the house lights came up a little less than two hours after she started, we still hadn't heard dishy Grammy news.

When Griffin is at her best, she evokes deserved guffaws. She's a decent verbal mimic and physical comic. Her bit about Harry Styles of One Direction, during which the "trashed" British boy-bander gabbed nonsensically to an indulgent Tom Hanks after an Eagles concert, was her best material all night, even better than an account of dinner at her 93-year-old mother's retirement home. And her update on the love-hate relationship she has with Barbara Walters — she loves Walters, who doesn't feel mutually — came as close as Griffin ever got to the provocative celebrity observations with which she made her name.

The problem seems rooted in Griffin herself becoming too famous and accepted. She's no longer on the D-list, which was the premise of her reality show on Bravo; she isn't standing with her nose pressed to the glass of Hollywood fame, because she's now on the inside. As the seven-minute opening tribute video made sure we knew, Griffin has two Emmys and a Grammy, the latter of which came after her sixth consecutive nomination for best comedy album. As she's become friends with more A-listers, she seems less willing to be outrageous. She's at a crossroads: What do you do when you've become the people you once mocked?